Radio Progreso & Hurricane Mitch

The following item is excerpted from an article in "The Catholic Messenger" of Davenport, Iowa of November 12, 1998. DXers may remember Radio Progreso being on SW in the 1970s and briefly in the early 1980s. Tocoa, which is actually about 200 km from Progreso, is the location of Radio Mundial, which put out a widely-heard harmonic on 2860 about 1990.

" In El Progreso, a northern Honduran city hard hit by flooding, some Jesuits tried to get a truck filled with food to the nearby town of Tocoa, cut off from the rest of Honduras by collapsed bridges and flooded roads. 'This makes you feel so small, so helpless in the midst of so much need,' said U.S. Jesuit Father Joe Owens in El Progreso. 'A lot of people lost everything and have nowhere to go.'

"Father Owens is station manager of Radio Progreso, a Church-sponsored radio station. He praised the station staff for 'a heroic effort' that kept the station on the air through the crisis, helping people keep track of family members and relaying emergency messages to rescuers. 'All I had to do was keep them fed, and they kept the station running.' said Father Owens, a native of Cambridge, Mass, who has worked in Honduras since 1984."

This website is maintained by Don Moore,Association of North American Radio Clubs
DXer of the Year for 1995.